When a user makes a request to product like The New York Times, that request hits an API gateway. An API gateway is the entry point for an external request. An API gateway serves several purposes: authentication, security, routing, load balancing, and logging.

API gateways have grown in popularity as applications have become more distributed, and companies offer a wider variety of services. If an API is public, and anyone can access it, you might need to apply rate limiting so that users cannot spam the API. If the API is private, the user needs to be authenticated before the request is fulfilled.

Kong is a company that builds infrastructure for API management. The Kong API gateway is a widely used open source project, and Kong is a company built around supporting and building on top of the API gateway.

Marco Palladino is the co-founder and CTO of Kong. He joins the show to tell the story of starting Kong eight years ago, and how the API gateway product evolved out of an API marketplace. Marco also discusses the architecture of Kong and his vision for how the product will develop in the future–including the Kong service mesh.